Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Philosophy
in the Present
ALAIN BADIOU and SLAVOJ IEK
Edited by Peter Engelmann
Translated by
PETER THOMAS and ALBERTO TOSCANO
polity
Contents
Editor's Preface vii
ALAIN BADIOU
Thinking the Event 1
SLAVOJ IEK
'Philosophy is not a Dialogue' 49
Discussion 73
Editor's Preface
The former French President Franois Mitterrand was known for
inviting philosophers to the Elyse during his period in office in
order to discuss political and social questions. He thus positioned
himself in a long tradition in which enlightened power sought to
come closer to the philosophers and to draw legitimacy from this
proximity. We do not know whether or not these meetings
influenced Mitterrand's political decisions, but at least he has
remained in our memory as an intellectual president.
Whether their advice is earnestly sought or they are only used as
decoration or intellectual cover, in reality the invited intellectuals
usually don't come out of such performances particularly well.
Nevertheless, being invited to the tables of power seems to exercise
a great attraction for them.
The times when what philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir or Jean-
Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault or Jean-Franois Lyotard had to say
about contemporary events, or the suggestions they would make for
the improvement of things, were regarded as important, belong to
the past. Today, even the impersonators of philosophers who
displaced philosophers in the 1970s have themselves been replaced
by entertainers and models, by footballers and boxers.
We might therefore be tempted to speak of a golden age when the
opinion of philosophers still seemed to count; but were they really
better times?
It was not after all very long ago that we talked about what the role
of the philosopher Karl Marx had been in the totalitarian regime of
the Soviet bloc. Wasn't the mass murder Pol Pot an intellectual
educated in Paris? How many people were humiliated, expelled and
murdered during the Chinese Cultural Revolution?
The question that governs this book, whether the philosopher
should take part in contemporary events and comment on them, is
the question regarding the role of intellectuals in our society, treated
in a philosophically specific fashion. It no longer suffices to answer
that the philosophers should not only interpret the world, but rather
change it.
The answer to this question today must take into account two
extremes. On the one hand, the participation of intellectuals in the
crimes of the twentieth century weighs heavily on the self-
understanding of this social group, at least insofar as it maintains a
practical memory of history. On the other hand, we could ask
ourselves if we really get a good deal if we let models, presenters,
sportspeople and similar groups occupy the position of the
intellectual in our contemporary media society.
The answers of the Parisian philosopher Alain Badiou and the
Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj iek during their
discussion of this theme in Vienna 2004 turned out to be more
modest and more sceptical than one might perhaps expect from
philosophers. Instead of taking refuge in an old glory that has long
since become historically obsolete, they try instead to recall the
specific quality of philosophical thought and derive their answers
from that.
Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek have known and esteemed one
another for a long time. Slavoj iek was continually proposing
Alain Badiou for the Passagen publishing programme. Badiou, for
his part, has been helping to translate iek's work into French.
Both know what the other will say and how he will argue, at least in
in order to lay out the grounds for our discussion, that I want to
introduce the expression 'philosophical situation'. All sorts of things
happen in the world, but not all of them are situations for
philosophy, philosophical situations. So I would like us to ask the
following question: what is a situation that is really a situation for
philosophy, a situation for philosophical thought? I am going to
offer you three examples, three examples of philosophical situations,
in order to give you some grasp of what I am referring to.
The first example is already, if I can put it like this, philosophically
formatted. It can be found in Plato's dialogue, Gorgias. This dialogue
presents the extremely brutal encounter between Socrates and
Callicles. This encounter creates a philosophical situation, which,
moreover, is set out in an entirely theatrical fashion. Why? Because
the thought of Socrates and that of Callicles share no common
measure, they are totally foreign to one another. The discussion
between Callicles and Socrates is written by Plato so as to make us
understand what it means for there to be two different kinds of
thought which, like the diagonal and the side of a square, remain
incommensurable. This discussion amounts to a relation between
two terms devoid of any relation. Callicles argues that might is right,
that the happy man is a tyrant - the one who prevails over others
through cunning and violence. Socrates on the contrary maintains
that the true man, who is the same as the happy man, is the Just, in
the philosophical sense of the term. Between justice as violence and
justice as thought there is no simple opposition, of the kind that
could be dealt with by means of arguments covered by a common
norm. There is a lack of any real relation. Therefore the discussion is
not a discussion; it is a confrontation. And what becomes clear to
any reader of the text is not that one interlocutor will convince the
other, but that there will be a victor and a vanquished. This is after
all what explains why Socrates methods in third dialogue are hardly
fairer than those of Callicles. Wanting the ends means wanting the
means, and it is a matter of winning, especially of winning in the eyes
of the young men who witness the scene.
In the end, Callicles is defeated. He doesn't acknowledge defeat, but
shuts up and remains in his corner. Note that he is the vanquished in
a dialogue staged by Plato. This is probably one of the rare
occurrences when someone like Callicles is the vanquished. Such are
the joys of the theatre.
Faced with this situation, what is philosophy? The sole task of
philosophy is to show that we must choose. We must choose
between these two types of thought. We must decide whether we
want to be on the side of Socrates or on the side of Callicles. In this
example, philosophy confronts thinking as choice, thinking as
decision. Its proper task is to elucidate choice. So that we can say the
following: a philosophical situation consists in the moment when a
choice is elucidated. A choice of existence or a choice of thought.
Second example: the death of the mathematician Archimedes.
Archimedes is one of the greatest minds ever known to humanity.
To this day, we are taken aback by his mathematical texts. He has
already reflected on the infinite, and had practically invented
infinitesimal calculus twenty centuries before Newton. He was an
exceptional genius.
Archimedes was a Greek from Sicily. When Sicily was invaded and
occupied by the Romans, he took part in the resistance, inventing
new war machines - but the Romans eventually prevailed.
At the beginning of the Roman occupation, Archimedes resumed his
activities. He was in the habit of drawing geometric figures on the
sand. One day, as he sits thinking at the sea's edge, reflecting on the
complicated figures he'd drawn on the shore, a Roman soldier
All the while, the honest husband tries to protect the runaways.
Husbands have the duty to denounce adulterers, they abhor the idea
of turning into their accomplices. Nevertheless, the husband - and
this is proof indeed that he genuinely loves his wife - tries to gain
time. He pretends that his wife has left for the provinces, to see
some relatives ... A good, honest husband - really. A truly admirable
character. But all the same, the lovers are denounced, captured, and
taken to their torture.
There follow the film's final images, which constitute a new instance
of the philosophical situation. The two lovers are tied back-to-back
on a mule. The shot frames this image of the two bound lovers
going to their atrocious death; both seem enraptured, but devoid of
pathos: on their faces there is simply the hint of a smile, a kind of
withdrawal into the smile. The word 'smile' here is only an
approximation. Their faces reveal that the man and the woman exist
entirely in their love. But the film's thought, embodied in the
infinitely nuanced black and white of the faces, has nothing to do
with the romantic idea of the fusion of love and death. These
'crucified loves' never desired to die. The shot says the very
opposite: love is what resists death.
At a conference held at the Fmis, Deleuze, quoting Malraux, once
said that art is what resists death. Well, in these magnificent shots,
Mizoguchi's art not only resists death but leads us to think that love
too resists death. This creates a complicity between love and art -
one which in a sense we've always known about.
What I here name the 'smile' of the lovers, for a lack of a better
word, is a philosophical situation. Why? Because in it we once again
encounter something incommensurable, a relation without relation.
Between the event of love (the turning upside down of existence)
and the ordinary rules of live (the laws of the city, the laws of
the event, you must remain at a distance from power, and you must
be firm in your decision.' This is the story that philosophy is always
telling us, under many different guises: to be in the exception, in the
sense of the event, to keep one's distance from power, and to accept
the consequences of a decision, however remote and difficult they
may prove.
Understood in this way, and only in this way, philosophy really is
that which helps existence to be changed.
Ever since Rimbaud, everyone repeats that 'the true life is absent'.
Philosophy is not worth and hour's effort if it is not based on the
idea that the true life is present. With regard to circumstances, the
true life is present in the choice, in distance and in the event.
Nevertheless, on the side of circumstances, we should not lose sight
of the fact that we are forced to make a selection in order to attain
the thought of the true life. This selection is founded, as we have
said, on the criterion of incommensurability.
What unites our three examples is the fact that they are rounded on
a relation between heterogeneous terms: Callicles and Socrates, the
Roman soldier and Archimedes, the lovers and society.
The philosophical relationship to the situation stages the impossible
relation, which takes the form of a story. We are told about the
discussion between Callicles and Socrates, we are told about the
murder of Archimedes, about the story of the crucified lovers. So,
we hear the tale of a relation. But the story shows that this relation is
not a relation, that it is the negation of relation. So that ultimately
what we are told about is a break: a break of the established natural
and social bond. But of course, in order to narrate a break, you first
need to narrate a relation. But in the end, the story is the story of a
break. Between Callicles and Socrates, one must choose. It will be
war of aggression of the very strong against the very weak, but with
legitimate defence against a measurable threat. The fact that there
were no weapons of mass destruction makes patently clear what
everyone already knew: that in this matter, there was no common
measure. Second, you have the absolute necessity of a choice. This is
the kind of situation in which it is not clear how one could be
something other than either for or against this war. This obligation
to choose is what gave the demonstrations and mobilizations against
the war their breadth. Third, you have a distance from power: the
popular demonstrations against the war create an important
subjective gap with regard to the hegemonic power of the United
States. Finally, you have, perhaps, the opening of a new situation
marked, among other things, by the importance of these
demonstrations, but also by new possibilities of common
understanding and action between France and Germany.
Finally, with regard to what is happening, you must first of all ask: 'Is
there a relation that is not a relation? Are there incommensurable
elements?' If the answer is positive, you must draw the
consequences: there is a choice, there is a distance, there is an
exception. And on these bases, you can pass from the mere
consideration of opinion to the philosophical situation. In these
conditions, we can give meaning to philosophical commitment. This
commitment creates its own conviction on the terrain of philosophy,
making use of philosophical criteria.
I insist on the singularity of philosophical commitment. We must
absolutely distinguish philosophy from politics. There are political
commitments that are illuminated by philosophy, or even made
necessary by philosophy, but philosophy and politics are distinct.
Politics aims at the transformation of collective situations, while
philosophy seeks to propose new problems for everyone. And this
proposition concerning new philosophical problems constitutes an
people like him, Derrida, Habermas and (from the cognitive field)
Daniel Dennett engage in philosophical debate. A glance at their
political positions reveals another picture: irrespective of their
philosophical positions, they are all a little to the left of the
democratic middle. On with democracy, perhaps even a little more,
is Rortys typical pragmatic conclusion. That shows that philosophy
is inconsequential. Is that really the case? Lets consider the political
agreement of Habermas and Derrida as a paradigmatic case: could
that not be an indication of the fact that their philosophical
positions are also not really incommensurable? That even their
opposition is merely a disjunctive synthesis?
If you look at the structure of their thought more closely, this
supposition is confirmed: fundamentally, both are concerned in the
same way with the problem of communication, or more precisely
with a communication that opens to the other, recognizes him and
leaves him his otherness, instead of damaging it. We are dealing
here, I believe, merely with two complementary versions, even if
Habermas claims an undamaged communication with the other and
his unique order, while Derrida emphasizes precisely the opposite:
we should open ourselves to the radical contingency of the other.
Badious great service, against these mutually complementary
positions, as it appears to me, is to have changed the entire field with
his ethics. Otherness is not the problem, but rather, the Same. For
me, this should be the philosophers first gesture, when he is
pressured with demands. To change the concepts of the debate itself
now, for example, virtual reality is a fashionable theme; we live in a
virtual universe: do we lose contact with authentic reality? Have we
completely alienated ourselves? Here we meet again the disjunctive
synthesis: we can think of postmodernists whose wonderful
nomadic subjectivity could shift from one artificial reality to the
next; or nostalgic conservatives and left-conservatives for whom that
would be a shame and who say that we must turn back instead to
authentic experience. We should do something different: namely,
reject the concepts of the debate and claim, not that virtual reality is
the problem, but rather, the reality of the virtual. How is that?
I mean: virtual reality Badiou has written that somewhere is a
relatively banal idea. It doesnt give us anything to think. Virtual
reality, that means: look how we can create with our technological
toys an appearance that in the end we believe to be reality. In my
view, it is the reality of the virtual which is interesting for thought.
The virtual is any particular thing, but nothing whole; it is if you
want the actual effect of the real. Here is the actual problem.
Lets go to the next theme that stimulates journalism: hedonism.
What is to be done when the old values fall away and humans lose
their belief, cultivate egotism and dedicate their life only to the
pursuit of pleasures? Once again, the field is divided into two camps:
every fixed moral attitude includes an act of violence Judith Butler
represents this typical postmodern attitude in her last book, still only
available in German, Zur Kritik der ethischen Gewalt
1
we must thus be
flexible and so on, which runs up against the theme of nomadic
subjectivity one again; fixed values and connections are what the
country needs that is the answer from the other side. Of course,
we should here once again tackle the problem directly and put the
concepts of the debate in question, with a type of Brechtian
Verfremdung; the thing itself will thus become strange to us: But wait
a minute? What are we speaking about here? About hedonism in a
consumer society whose chief characteristic is a radical prohibition:
enjoy immediately. It is always: Of course you should enjoy, but in
order really to be able to enjoy, first you have to go jogging, go on a
diet and you shouldnt be sexually harassing anybody. At the end is
total body discipline. But lets go back to the belief, to the clich that
today we have lost belief. This is nothing more than a pseudo-
debate: today we believe more than ever and this is the problem,
as Robert Pfaller has shown. The concepts of the debate are
therefore no longer the same. Unfortunately, however, the great
majority of philosophers havent stepped up to the challenges at this
high level, and thus they burden us with false answers.
The worst are of course answers in the style of New Age
monstrosities, which do not deserve the honour of being called
philosophy. We can all think of some interesting examples here. Try
comparing if you are old enough, which I am and also some of
you unfortunately are too a typical social sciences and humanities
bookshop of today with one from twenty-five years ago. Today,
unfortunately, there is three times as much talk of wisdom,
enlightenment and the New Age and correspondingly less of
philosophy. So much for the first false answer, which of course was
already too much anyway. Two other false answers appear to me to
be much more problematic. Which? Id like to refer here once again
to Badiou, who stresses that philosophy and politics should not be
confused with each other. He claims in his text on the end of
communism that the problem in relation to totalitarianism is that we
still dont have an appropriate socio-political theory with which we
can analyse these of course deplorable phenomena like Nazism and
Stalinism in their own conceptuality as political projects. To give a
philosophical fast food answer, passing itself off as a deep
explanation, which in truth is only a substitute that allows us to
dispense with thinking, would be the worst thing that a philosopher
can do here and unfortunately usually does. Perhaps you will be
surprised here, but my high regard for Adorno doesnt stop me from
saying that here lies the problem of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Instead of concrete analysis, we are offered a prime example of
philosophical (in the negative sense of the word) confusion, a type
of politico-ontological short circuit: the pseudo-transcendental
like, are not residues of the past, but its logical product. Let me once
more approach this like a simpleton. I would then say: Stalinist
communism had to be the prime example of this. For to say it
with extremely simplified and stupid concepts fascism was a
conservative reaction. There were people behind it who again, to
express it in an admittedly nave way intended to do something
incredibly evil and actually did it (what a surprise!). The real trauma,
however, is Stalinism. The communist project I hope you agree
with me opened with a strong emancipator potential and went
wrong. That is the trauma of the dialectic of enlightenment; but
what do we find in critical theory? Nothing of this. There is
Neumanns Behemoth, the worst type of journalistic sociology that
can be imagined, based on the fashionable idea of a convergence,
according to which Roosevelts America of the New Deal, Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union tended towards the same organized
society. There is Marcuses Soviet Marxism: a very peculiar book,
which never precisely explains its authors position. Then there are
some attempts by Habermasians, like Andrew Aroto, to play off the
idea of civil society as place of existence against totalitarian
communist dominance. But even here we dont have any theory that
helps us to explain Stalinist communism. By the way, I believe that
the theory of civil society is completely mistaken. At any rate, I
should say that in the break-up of Yugoslavia just as in most other
conflicts between the state and civil society, I was regularly on the
side of the state. Civil society meant democratic opposition; it also
meant, however, violent nationalism. The formula of Miloevi
described precisely this highly explosive mixture of nationalist civil
society and the party nomenclature. The dissidents demanded a
dialogue between the party nomenclature and civil society, and
Miloevi actually did this.
Lets take Habermas: does reading his books betray the fact that half
of his homeland, Germany, was socialist? No. It is as if this matter
of fact didnt exist. I believe that this is, with a fashionable concept,
a type of symptomatic gap, an empty place.
I will now speak a little more briefly. I want to conclude with a
remark about the possible role of philosophy in our society. There is
a whole series of false philosophical positions: neo-Kantian state
philosophy, postmodern neo-Sophism and so forth. The worst is the
external moralization of philosophy, the logic of which is roughly
the following: I am a philosopher, and as such I devise great
metaphysical systems; I am also however a good human and am
concerned about all the disaster in this world. We must struggle
against this disaster ... Derrida is weakest at that point when, in the
middle of his book Spectres of Marx, he becomes entirely
unphilosophical and lists the disasters in this world in ten points.
Unbelievable! I didnt believe my eyes as I read that; but there they
were, ten points; and they attested to an extreme lack of though:
unemployment and dropouts without money in our cities; drug
cartels; the domination of the media monopolies and so forth. As if
he wanted to give the impression of being not merely a great
philosopher but also a warm-hearted person. Excuse me, but here I
can think of only a relatively fatal comparison: at the end of works
of popular literature there is usually a short description of the author
and in order to valorise their curriculum a little, one adds
something like: she currently lives in the South of France,
surrounded by many cats and dedicated to painting ... That is more
or less the level were dealing with. It almost prompts me therefore
to add something mischievous to my next books: In his private life
he tortures dogs and kills spiders, simply in order to push this
custom ad absurdum. But I want to go on: if we philosophers are
asked for our opinion, often all one wants in truth is that we
French could have had philosophy if only they had been clever
enough. Conversely, the non-appearance of the revolution was the
condition for German philosophy. My idea is now the following:
perhaps we have to break with the dream that there is a normal
philosophy. Perhaps philosophy is abnormality par excellence. Thus
I would read Badious theory. (We, Badiou and I, embrace each
other, but in reality we hate each other. Our usual joke is: if I take
power, he goes to the camps; but that is another story.) I also follow
explicitly his thesis about the conditions of philosophy: that
philosophy is by definition excessive; that it literally exists only
through the excessive connection to external conditions, which are
of either an amorous, political, scientific or artistic nature.
Lastly, another critique, even if a very friendly one: our different
assessments of Kant could represent a disagreement between us.
And I would like to ask you, perhaps only rhetorically, if you are not
also of the opinion that there is despite the many terrible things
that I too have said about a specific neo-Kantianism something in
Kant that is worth saving. What? What interests me in philosophy
above all is that moment of foreignness to which you refer. Isnt
foreignness at the beginning of philosophy? The so-called Ionian
philosophers of nature emerged in what is now Turkish Asia with
the development of commodity production. I dont want to draw
here the vulgar-Marxist parallel that commodity production means
abstraction and that his abstraction of the commodity lies at the
foundation of philosophical abstraction; where I want to steer out
interest is towards this moment of foreignness that emerges through
displacement; that philosophy this is what Heidegger wants to tell
us was from the very beginning not the discourse of those who
feel the certainty of being at home. It always required a minimum of
breakdown of the organic society. Ever since Socrates we always
meet over and again this otherness, these holes, and interestingly we
can even discover the foreign in Descartes and thus show up his
slanderers. In the second section of the Discourse on Method there
is, I think, his famous remark about how he discovered through
travel not only the foreignness of other customs, but also that ones
own culture is not less strange, even laughable, if one views it with
other eyes. That is in my opinion the zero point of philosophy.
Every philosopher adopts this place of displacement.
And now my question to you: Im tempted here to rehabilitate the
too often lightly taken Kantian concept of cosmopolitan civil
society. This concept, I believe, must be brought into connection
with Kants differentiation between public and private use of reason,
whose particularity consists in running contrary to intuition: what
Kant names the private use of reason regards the work of civil servants
in the state apparatus. Intellectual debates, even when they are
conducted in private, he calls on the other hand the public use of
reason. What is Kant getting at? The private is for him, I believe, in
the first instance the particular community rooted in a place. Kants
idea, however, is that we as intellectuals should engage in the
position of the singular universal; thus, a singularity that immediately
participates in universality, since it breaks through the idea of a
particular order. You can be a human immediately, without first
being German, French, English, etc. This legacy of Kant is more
relevant today than ever. The idea of an intellectual debate that
breaks through the particular order belies the conservative doctrine
according to which only the complete identification with ones own
roots makes it possible to be human in the emphatic sense of this
word. You are completely human only when you are completely
Austrian, Slovenian, French, and so forth. The fundamental message
of philosophy, however, says that you can immediately participate in
universality, beyond particular identifications.
Discussion
ALAIN BADIOU: First of all, I would like to say that when I have
had an occasion to criticize Kant, it was really a critique of what you
have called neo-Kantianism, that is, of that sort of academic Kant
which has made its return in these last ten or fifteen years as a kind
of official philosophy. As far as Kant is concerned, I think it is
possible to connect two of your observations. First observation:
philosophy really needs to be able to grasp that in truths, in new
problems, there is something which is irreducible to any
preconceived idea of human nature. I think this is very important:
there is something inhuman in what the philosopher deals with. We
can give it many names. For a long time, the name for what
surpasses humanity was God, the infinite, the intelligible, the
absolute, and so on. We can change these names and change our
conception, but I believe that in what philosophy deals with there is
something that is not reducible to the human, which is to say
something inhuman. Some time ago Foucault had already remarked
that, after all, man is a kind of theoretical construction with his own
history, that we could see when man, or humanism, had begun and
Foucault added: well also see when it ends. Thats my first remark.
This is what in France was called theoretical anti-humanism, which
was Foucaults position, but also that of Althusser and many others.
When you said: The true problem is knowing whether there exist or
not forms of radical modification of what we call humanity , you
posed a very profound and natural question. Because man
designates an ideological construction, a historical construction.
There is no good reason whatsoever to think that philosophy must
indefinitely be used to consolidate this construction. I think that,
ever since Plato, philosophy has been faced with the inhuman, and
that it is there that its vocation lies. Each time that philosophy
That is the real question. From this point of view I will answer that
yes, we can bring together your two observations, the one on the
connection between universality and singularity, on the one hand,
and the one on the necessity of overcoming humanism, on the
other. I apologize that once again I am here in agreement with my
friend Slavoj iek.
SLAVOJ IEK: Unfortunately, I must also agree with you. Marx,
in Class Struggles in France, has a very beautiful passage that explains
the political dynamic of 1848: the two royalist fractions, Bourbons
and Orleanists, united in the republican Party of Order (Parti de
lordre). Marx says that one could only be a royalist by acknowledging
the anonymous kingdom of the republic. In this sense, I agree with
you completely: the human as such appears only in the non-human;
the non-human as the only way to be human in the universal sense
in an immediate way. Why do I think that? Here I would like to
come back to Kant, since I believe that Kant provides us with the
conceptual instrument that allows us to think about this by means
of a seemingly secondary philosophical distinction, which, in my
opinion, however, is crucial for understanding him. In the Critique of
Pure Reason, he develops the distinction between a negative and an
infinite judgement. To put it simply: the negative judgement is a
judgement that denies the subject a predicate; what Kant names an
infinite judgement is the kind of judgement that ascribes to the
subject a negating predicate. A negative judgement exists when, for
example, one says: The soul is not mortal. The infinite judgement
would be: The soul is immortal. And what follows from that? Here,
horror novels could help us, if you will allow me to call on Stephen
King, my man for all seasons. We know the concept of the undead.
What does it actually mean? Dead is dead, and if someone is not
dead, they are simply alive. But when we say that someone is
undead, as is said in horror literature, that is not supposed to mean
that he still lives; he is dead, but not in the usual sense: he is the
living dead. One sees that here another realm opens up, and my idea
is that this undead is the Kantian transcendental subject. It is non-
human precisely in this sense; non-human not in the sense of the
animalistic, but rather, as the excessive dimension of the human
itself. Seen in this way, there is something unique in that which Kant
names the dimension of the transcendental. A few days ago, a friend
from Tokyo wrote to me he knows my penchant for curiosities
that in Japan one can now buy telephones for only 85 dollars that
function in a very peculiar way: you can hear the voice of the caller
clearly, but there is no longer a ring tone. You merely graft a little
disc onto your skull, and you receive the voice of the other vibrating
directly in the eardrum. You can thus hear the other but optimal
reception arises only when you shut your ears. We are dealing here
with the exception a direct sensory perception that bypasses the
sensory media. Taking a step further we can think of these
remarkable experiments in brain research which are based on the
idea that a feeling for example, desire or pain can be produced
by stimulating the nerve centre directly, without going via the five
senses. Why did I mention Kant here? You know the theory of
schematism: in order for something really to be, it must fit certain
categories. But do we not here have a type of pain that is abstract
and unschematized? Not a pain of this and that, but an immediate
pain? That is a little similar please allow me this ironic parenthesis
to the first Slovenian currency in 1990-1, after independence. I
loved this currency, certainly not due to pride that we had our own
money, but because people did not notice that there was something
a little fishy about it. After we had abolished the Yugoslav Dinar, for
two years there was money in circulation with the units five, ten and
so forth. No one remarked, however, that it didnt have a name: you
had only 500; 500 what? Nothing more. No dollars, no schillings ...
Kant opened up this realm for us. And in this sense, Lacan too, in
opposition to postmodernism, is correct: science is not merely a
language game; it deals with the unschematized Real.
BADIOU: It seems to me that the problem with philosophical
commitment is that it is often thought to be primarily critical. Very
often, one equates philosophy and critique. So that philosophical
commitment would ultimately amount to saying what is evil, what is
suffering, of saying whats not acceptable, or what is false. The task
of philosophy would be primarily negative: to entertain doubt, the
critical spirit, and so on and so forth. The essence of philosophical
intervention is really affirmation. Why is it affirmation? Because if
you intervene with respect to a paradoxical situation, or if you
intervene with regard to a relation that is not a relation, you will have
to propose a new framework of though, and you will have to affirm
that it is possible to think this paradoxical situation, on condition, of
course, that a certain number of parameters be abandoned, and a
certain number of novelties introduced. And when all is said and
done, the only proof for this is that you will propose a new way of
thinking the paradox. Consequently, the determinant element of
philosophical intervention is affirmative a point on which I agree
with Deleuze. When Deleuze says that philosophy is in its essence
the construction of concepts, he is right to put forward this creative
and affirmative dimension, and to mistrust any critical or negative
reduction of philosophy. When you just said that we should
understand inhuman as something other than a negation, I am
obviously entirely in agreement with you. Once again I regret to say
that we continue to be indefinitely in agreement, which besides
proves that we engage in affirmation and not negation. Inhuman
must be understood as the affirmative conceptual element from
within which one thinks the displacement of the human. And this
displacement of the human always presupposes that one has accepted
that the initial correlation is the link between the human and the
inhuman, and not the perpetuation of the human as such.
Let me take an ideological example. At the end of the seventies, we
witnessed the appearance, in France, of what was called nouvelle
philosophie [the new philosophy]. The real creator of nouvelle philosophie
in France was Andr Glucksmann, who just the day before had been
a Maoist: such are the reversals of History. Glucksmanns
fundamental thesis, which he continues to uphold today that is, in
his support for the USA and its war against Iraq is that it is not
possible to unify consciences around a positive vision of the Good.
One can only unify consciences in the critique of Evil: this is the
pivotal thesis of his entire intellectual itinerary. This negative
position defines a philosophical intervention of an entirely specific
sort: the philosopher is a kind of physician. He diagnoses evil,
suffering, and, if need be, he suggests remedies in order to return to
the normal state of affairs. For example: given that Saddam Hussein
is a horrifying despot, one must employ against him vigorous
therapeutic means and these were employed, as you know, at the
cost of a hundred thousand Iraqis, as of today. The American army
is in the process of killing the patient, but youve got to do what
youve got to do. Glucksmann is happy. He entirely subscribes to an
integrally critical vision of philosophical intervention.
For my part, I think it is important to defend a wholly other
conception of philosophical intervention. It is not for nothing that
the first great philosophical idea was Platos idea of the Good. Plato
had understood perfectly well that at a given moment it is the
element of inhuman affirmation which is decisive, that it is this
element which carries a radical choice. If tonight you havent exactly
witnessed a confrontation, it is because with regard to this crucial
point Slavoj and I are on the same side. So that there cant be a
major contradiction between us.
IEK: My paranoid reply to that would be: what if you are a liar
and only pretend to think like me? The more you agree with me, the
more you are in danger. Paradoxically, we share with the
postmodern critical pessimists the focus on the inhuman. In the
postmodern ideology of the inhuman, the inhuman is a terrifying
excess that must absolutely be avoided. This ideology can even
absorb a certain aspect of Lacan. There is this mythology of the
terrifying you shouldnt get too close to the fire, you have to keep
the right distance; that idea that we, as in Edgar Allan Poe, live in a
world on the edge of the abyss and that it is just a matter of
maintaining the appropriate distance: not in order to act as if there
were no radical evil, but merely in order to be sure that you dont fall
for it. That is of course the exact opposite of what we propagate as
the inhuman: the inhuman as a space of redefinition.
Here I want to go back briefly to Richard Rorty, who I admire, as I
have already said, because of his honest radicality. What is
problematic is that for him the ultimate truth consists in the truth of
the suffering of an individual: it should be open to each of us to give
expression to our specific experience of suffering. That leads us, I
think, to the assumption of a false type of incommensurability. At
the foundation of Rortys conception lies a reference to
particularism, whose disastrousness you have already criticized in
your Ethics. It is a version of political correctness: only a black,
lesbian single mother knows about the suffering of a black, lesbian
single mother and so forth. Deleuze already protested strongly
against this, because he said that this type of reference always
amounts even when it appears in the short term to be emancipator
to a reactionary position. Rortys concept of telling stories of
suffering correspondingly demands an ethics that holds the space
open in which anyone can tell their story. With this we lose any
serious concern with truth. The only bad thing, the model of moral
decides; I only make suggestions. You, the people, are the ones who
make the decisions. Here one would rather follow Lacan, who said
that also in the political act one must take the risk completely upon
oneself. On the third reason: in The Communist Manifesto, Marx
famously wrote that communism was accused of abolishing private
property: but capitalism itself had already done that. Something
similar, I think, is happening today with democracy. There is a whole
series of symptomatic indications of this; for example, the renewed
popularity of Ralf Dahrendorf or Leo Strauss. The usual story goes
like this: democracy? Yes but only for those who are also mature
for democracy. Now, we all know what sort of a dead-end the US is
facing in Iraq. If they introduce democracy and with democracy I
dont mean any authentic form of democracy, but rather, our
beautiful, corrupt multi-party democracy that would probably
mean the electoral victory of the Shiites. And one notes all the
current rethinking; it is a key word: some US philosophers, Alan
Dershowitz for example, are of the opinion that we should rethink
human rights and change them to the extent that in certain cases
torture is permissible. Here it is not just a case of the question:
democracy or not. It is decisive to see what actually goes on in
democracy. If there is a symbolic meaning I hate the idea of
September 11, then in my opinion we should look for it in
connection with the date 1989. For me, 1989 was not the end of
utopias, as it is commonly claimed, not the end of communism, but
rather the unleashing of the great utopia of liberal capitalism, marked
by Francis Fukuyamas End of History. And September 11 is the
answer to it; if it means anything at all, it means that this utopia is
today dead. The Americans, I think, are paying the price in the
meantime: look at American politics it has been completely
transformed. We dont have to believe their phrases about
democracy any more. They want to combine their world, their
say it simply, is that which Lacan once called going to the end of the
analytic process; and I told myself with doubts that this process is
political, even that any political activity correlates with it. Ive now
abandoned that. I dont believe any more that the conclusion from
psychoanalysis is, if I can say it like this, the authentic form of
political engagement. That is one thing. The other is: I have taken a
further very risky step for which I will probably once again pay
dearly in my personal relations. I have openly and crudely attacked
Jacques-Alain Miller. His latest political pronouncements are, in my
view, a scandal. In his book Le Neveu de Lacan he takes up a position
against dogmatism we know these commonplaces: one should be
flexible, subversive and takes up a particularly fatal opposition that
Julia Kristeva introduced, though in another connection: the
opposition of revolts and subversion, on the one hand, and
revolution, on the other. Revolts are good, they bring creative
energy, they make things dynamic; revolution is bad, since it
introduces a new order. That is unbelievable: in a certain way, an
absolute liberal vulgarity.
With Badiou, on the other hand, I feel as Ribbentrop said to
Molotov during his trip to Moscow in 1939 among comrades.
Translators Notes
1
Shurkamp 2003. This was the printed version of Butlers Adomo-
Vorlesungen 2002 at the Institut fr Sozialforschung at the Johann
Wolfgang Goethe-Universitt, Frankfurt am Main. A reworked
version is now available in English in Giving an Account of Oneself,
New York, Fordham University Press, 2005.]
2
iek refers to Revolution at the Gates. iek on Lenin: The 1917
Writings, London: Verso, 2002.
3
Le sicle was published by ditions du Seuil in 2005; English
translation: The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Polity,
2007)
4
The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).